Wednesday, October 30, 2013

At this point in our story
from the Mahabharata, the Pandava brothers find themselves living out their 13th
year of exile, the year they have to live in disguise and not be
discovered.How perfect that we have
come to this point during the week of Halloween.

There are traditions in
every culture for dressing up, wearing costumes and disguising oneself.This is a metaphor for maya or illusion.Maya is the veil that descends that differentiates us from our source. So in
a sense our whole human existence is like wearing a costume. The truth is, it
is impossible for us to be cut off from our source, yet we can and often do
have the feeling of being separate.When
we dress up or disguise ourselves we have a direct experience of maya – we may not recognize the person
looking back out from the mirror, but it doesn’t change who you are underneath
the costume.It’s only
because we are embodied (i.e. wear the “human” costume) that we
are able to reflect back to our own divinity – it’s a complete paradox.Although
maya is the veil that separates us
from our connection to source, it also serves as the portal back to that same
one-ness.

Another way to think about
this is like wrapping up a gift.We’ve
all had the experience of being handed a gift in the plastic bag it was
purchased in – it’s still a gift and it’s nice to receive.But how much more fun is it to be given a
beautifully wrapped package with fancy paper and bows.The gift inside doesn’t change, but isn’t it
a nicer experience to joyfully tear off the wrapping?Our true nature, who we really are, is satchitananda (one-ness, or
being-consciousness-bliss) but we forget. Maya exists purely for the joy of rediscovering ourselves, like the
joy of unwrapping a beautiful gift.Without darkness we can’t know light, without separation we can’t know
one-ness.This is what our yoga
practice does for us - pulls back the cosmic veil so we can see who/what we
really are at the core of our being.From
the outside looking in sometimes all we can see is the surface, the disguise,
yet we know that's not all we are.

Maya has
taught me one of the most important, life-altering, consciousness-shifting
lessons of my yoga practice: We are not
separate – there is an intelligence, an interconnected-ness, a one-ness that has
brought us all together, it is part of each of us and it is always there.It tells me even if I am lonely, I am not
alone. Neither are you.

Maya practices:

Off the mat:

Here is a beautiful practice
to invite into our relationships and interactions with people and with nature:
practice seeing beyond the “costume” of everyone you come into contact with to
the oneness beneath.Recognize their
divinity first.

On the mat:

Open to Grace: Recognize that
the human “costumes” around you contain the same source

Muscular Energy: Hug muscles
to bones, bones to marrow, marrow all the way to your Source giving you
strength

Organic Energy: Let the
light of who you really are shine through - through your clothing, through any
role or disguise you might have put on today

Offer a Namaste: “I honor the place in you in which the entire
Universe dwells, I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of
Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place
in me, we are One.”

Sunday, October 20, 2013

We started our blog a bit
out of order so I wanted to go back and give the background story for the
questions we’ve been reflecting on the past 2 weeks.

At this point in the
Mahabharata, the Pandava brothers find themselves in the woods hunting
deer.After an unsuccessful hunt, they
are tired and thirsty. Yudhishthira, the eldest brother, sends his brothers out
one by one to search for water and none of them return.He follows closely behind Bhima, the last
brother he sends out, and as he emerges into the clearing at the edge of the
forest he sees a beautiful crystal lake and all four of his brothers lying dead
on the shore.An “invisible voice”
speaks to him, explaining that the lake belongs to him and as each brother
approached thirsty he asked them to answer his questions before drinking.None of the brothers honored his request and
so he killed each of them in turn.The
voice asks if Yudhishthira will answer the questions before drinking or meet
the same fate.Yudhishthira agrees to
answer his questions, and these are the questions we have been discussing the
past couple of weeks.(Spoiler alert –
he successfully answers all the questions and the “invisible voice”, who we
learn is really the voice of his father Dharma, restores the slain brothers
back to life.)We’ll continue to look at
more of Dharma’s questions over the next few weeks, but let’s talk a little
more about this story first.

To me, this is a story about
patience.The “invisible voice” acted impatiently
and killed the brothers without recognizing that they were suffering a long day
of hunting and perhaps it would have been difficult for them even to talk
without having some water first.The
brothers acted impatiently by putting their need for water above the needs of
the owner of the lake.The root of the
word patience in Latin and Greek means suffering.In Hebrew the root of the word means to
endure.So being patient means that
it’s not going to be easy, that we have to set our needs aside for a while and
there is discomfort in doing that.

To be patient means to see
another perspective, whether it is our own or someone else’s.It is a practice of loving kindness. When we pause before honking our horn at the
car in front of us, or before banging our groceries down and muttering under our breath while the lady in front of us at the
supermarket slowly writes her check rather than swiping her card, or
before reading my 6 year old the word rather than letting him sound it out, we give a beautiful gift.We tell that
person I care about you and your feelings, and we reinforce to ourselves our
own capacity for open-mindedness.It
works the same towards ourselves – when we let challenging poses unfold slowly
and mindfully rather than forcing or pushing our bodies we send a powerful
message of acceptance and self-love.

Here are some other ways
patience can help us in our yoga practice, both on the mat and off:

Open to Grace: Open yourself to a bigger picture of the world, where
everyone’s needs are equally important.

Recognize that
you are part of something bigger, we are all interconnected so making time
and/or space for the other makes time and space for you too.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

At Shree for the next few
weeks we are talking about the questions that Yudhisthira needs to answer to
earn himself a sip of water to quench his thirst, and to restore his brothers’
lives in the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharata.Our question of the week for this
week is:

Q: What enemy cannot be overcome?

A: Anger

At first I had trouble with
this one – how “un-yogic” to think we cannot overcome anger!But I think what is really being said is that
anger arises - it tells us we care and that’s not a bad thing. Its what
we do with it that matters. Anger in and of itself is not a
"bad" emotion. There is no "bad" emotion. If we
choose to eschew anger, do away with it, bury it, etc. one of two things happen:
we either become numb, insensitive, tuned out to reality, or we become
resentful and bitter. Because in reality its not possible, we will get
angry (and that’s appropriate in many situations!) and its going to come out
one way or another so may as well be prepared and know what to do so we can
react in a way that is in alignment with our highest aspirations. We
recognize that if we perpetuate the anger - i.e., bring it forth into the
world, we exacerbate the problem. When we can feel anger, honor that we
feel that way, and yet respond with loving-kindness we transform our world and
the world around us.Marc Gafni says "In
a world of outrageous pain, the only response is outrageous love." I
agree.

So how can we put this into
practice? I was listening to an interview with Buddhist scholar Sylvia
Boorstein, and she was talking about helping her children get through struggles
they face. She shared that when they are upset she says to them"Sweetheart, you're in pain. Let's
pay attention to what happening, then we'll figure out what to do."After many times saying this to her children,
she realized she could say this to herself when she was feeling strong
emotions.

Anger is heating, it fires
us up. Heat is not "bad", it just is, like everything else. What
do we do when we get heated up - how do we react? If we take Sylvia’s advice we just become
mindful and notice we are feeling a certain way and decide what we're going to
do about it. Can we use that heat to fire us up to make a change for the
better? Like in every yoga practice, the asana give us an opportunity to
work through our human-ness, our embodiment, with loving-kindness, without
judgment about why we feel how we feel. By purposefully heating
ourselves us we "practice" dealing with it in a place that is safe
for us to have that experience, then when we go out into the world we know what
to do.

Here are some simple ways to
“embody” your anger (or any other strong emotion you are having) on your mat:

Open to Grace: accept any
feelings of anger as part of your human-ness

Muscular Energy: embrace the
heat and emotion (don’t try to push it away or ignore it)

Organic Energy: offer out
loving kindness, send out outrageous love in spite of how you are feeling